Letter from the editor
When I was 5 years old, I found a photograph of my parents in a nightstand table when they were in college. The people staring at the camera were totally unfamiliar to me. There were no signs of age on their faces, both had long hair (which I really got a kick out of), their clothes looked absolutely foreign to me and it was as if they were from a different era.
Although I didn’t quite understand it back then, I realized that picture captured our parents’ generation. Our parents went through such a remarkable time in history. My mother grew up during desegregation in Memphis. My dad worked at his university’s newspaper during the Kent State shootings. They both were in high school and college during the Vietnam War and Watergate. They grew up in an atmosphere full of change and student movements.
I used to think once I got to college, it would be the same way. We would do sit-ins, have rallies and protests, and generally decry the political atmosphere. But when I got here, I found out it was more about going out, making friends, doing new stuff. And it didn’t take long to become wrapped up in all that, but I always wondered what led to this seemingly static college campus. In this issue of garnet&black, we decided to go along with the theme of looking back to our past as a way to see where we are going and to forecast our future. The story about the falling away of college protests looks at the pages from our parents’ past and explains why there is not the same kind of widespread political activism on campuses today.
Even though we might not have the same expressions of involvement as our parents did, we are still connected to the world as a whole and care about what happens. Up in Student Media, we’ve gotten to shake hands with possibly the next president of the United States as candidates have passed through Columbia. We reported on the Virginia Tech tragedy. We grew up during the explosion of the Internet. We are in the middle, arguably the end, of a politically divided war. There are tons of significant things going on now that we are getting to witness firsthand and are the kinds of things that we’ll remember forever.
Sometime, way down the road, I can’t wait til my kid finds that old picture of me and I get to tell them what it was like growing up in such an exciting time.
